The short answer, according to The Mary Sue, is that Disney thinks boys fear anyone with a vagina on their T-shirts. A former Marvel employee who spoke anonymously has explained what’s going on:

While working at Marvel post-acquisition, I saw a deck circulated by Disney’s Brand Marketing team. I’m prohibited from sharing the slides, but the takeaway is that, unlike the actual demos, the desired demographics had no females in it whatsoever. I asked my supervisor why that was. Ever the pragmatist, he said, “That’s not why Disney bought us. They already have the girls’ market on lockdown.”

In other words, Disney already sells little girls lots of princess junk, so why bother trying to sell them any T-shirts with superheroines on them? But that doesn’t explain the other end of the equation, which is why Disney thinks putting a woman on a T-shirt will drive away anybody with a Y chromosome.

Anecdotal evidence, at least, would indicate otherwise. When we posted about the lack of Gamora merch, we had no shortage of parents weighing in complaining that their son was wondering why a Guardian was missing. And you only have to go as far as Twitter’s search function to find men annoyed their Avengers merch options are missing a team member or two:

Probably buying a Black Widow Funko Pop just because Disney is dropping the ball on giving her other merchandise.

Taking the most generous tack here, which is that Disney did market research and found that in the twenty-first century, boys fear girls on their shirts, you’d think they’d at least have a print-on-demand shirt or something for people to order. It’s not like custom T-shirts in small numbers are a weird or strange phenomenon on the Internet, or that nerds don’t buy action figures; Disney was perfectly happy to let Hot Toys make a premium Black Widow figure.

But considering what else we’ve seen from the toy industry, one suspects the most generous tack is not the one to take. Hopefully Disney will address this soon, because whether they want to admit it or not, it isn’t going away.

Join The Discussion: Log In With

Reading through that article further, it’s not entirely Disney per se. It’s the licensees. Your JC Penneys and Walmarts and Marshall Fields. These are the ones who order the product from Disney and their demands are what help make Disney’s decisions.

The author goes on to say that if you want merchandise featuring these characters then make it known to the people you would buy the product from.

I guess I misunderstood the article a little bit then. She said the main course of action to correct this is to contact the licensees to demand those products. I took that to mean that the licensees had more control than they actually do.

Except it’s unclear there’s any analysis behind this, and why leave a member of a group of a T-shirt with a photo of that group? It’s kind of like having a Beatles T-shirt where it’s just John, Paul, and Ringo.

@Dan Seitz Wait, you think there was no analysis done before the marketing department made these decisions? Are you becoming a Marketing Analysis Truther, demanding to see the paperwork before you believe they didn’t just arbitrarily do this? Do you honestly believe they would make any marketing or business decisions like this based on… what, hunches?

I imagine after the first Avengers movie licensing raking in infinity dollars, that Disney/Marvel have a pretty good idea of which character sells what. It makes total sense that boys are interested in boy things and girls are interested in girl things. As a kid, thats how my brain worked.

Its unfortunate that that is how it works, and I’m sure there will be boys and girls out there who want Black Widow stuff, but my guess is that number isn’t big enough to justify producing, distributing, and dedicating shelf space for that type of product. Especially when there are toys and clothes that will sell much better that could be in that place.

Or maybe because they don’t want to make something that they wont make the most money on hence why there’s no hawk eye merch either. Have a special edition from the online store or something but nope they would rather alienate a portion of the fan base. Plus don’t ever think that big companies are smarter then you.

I don’t think it’s a matter of being a ‘truther’ or even a vocal minority. Just because a few people are talking about a problem doesn’t mean there is no problem. I think their results are probably solid but the data they are looking at is a result of a vicious cycle. Parents tell their kids that boys don’t want ‘girly things’, boys are taught they don’t want ‘girly things’ and so ‘girly things’ aren’t bought and then they grow up and tell their boys that they don’t want ‘girly things’. It doesn’t really prove or disprove anything but female characters are conspicuous in their absence. When I was a kid I didn’t really care about male or female characters, all I knew is that I needed a Storm or a Jean Gray to re-enact the scenes from the X-Men cartoon and I didn’t have them and that made me sad.

Boo. I could see where a boy wouldn’t want, say, a t-shirt with just Black Widow, but she should be included in the team stuff. And why not market her to girls? My brother’s girls are too young to be into the movies, but they’ve shown interest in male heroes like Spider-Man, Iron Man, etc. based solely on the toys. I’m sure they’d like a Black Widow or a Gamora toy, too. Even if you’re looking at it from a cynical merchandising perspective, why not hook ’em when they’re young?

Also, I remember having X-Men merch featuring Storm, Rogue, Jean, Psylocke, etc. when I was a kid. Does that get a pass just because there’s more than one lady or something?

I’m glad there’s ANY merch featuring lady heroes, but I wish they’d stop acting like only girls can like them. Nobody bats an eye when my 3-year-old niece wants a Spider-Man action figure, or when 10-year-old me had tons of X-Men stuff with male and female heroes. Kinda’ hard to say that the lady hero stuff won’t sell when you won’t even make it.

I don’t really perceive that girls are discouraged from liking male superheroes. I guess they’re more encouraged to like female ones, but I don’t think many people bat an eye when a girl wears a Superman/Batman/Wolverine/Darth Vader shirt. Guys are discouraged from liking female superheroes, though. For some reason, it’s perceived to have so much more to do with gender identity shit when guys like female characters/toys.

Well obviously it’s because girls who like boy stuff are cool because they don’t like stupid girl stuff, but a boy who likes girl stuff has parents who listen to Elton John and talk about their periods or something. ARE YOU SAYING YOU WANT CHILDREN TO HAVE PERIODS??

Since the dudebros at Marvel and Disney consider her so unnecessary why did they bother including her in the Avengers movies?
Oh sure, now I remember, they’re afraid their ultra straight superheros would appear gay without any vagina near them, but that’s the only purpose she serves.

As an adult male, I have no problem with ScarJo on my t-shirts, mugs and what have yous, but I can confirm that when I was a little boy in elementary school I wouldn’t be caught dead with a girl on my shirt. No one would. You’d be teased all year and never be able to wear that shirt again. It seems silly now, but that’s how the little kid world works and the Disney and Marvel marketing guys who know it.

That being said, an all-female Avengers movie would be awesome and I’d be there just as quickly as I’ll be at Age of Ultron in a few weeks.

9 out of 10 times, the market surveys of demand are correct. Sure, it may suck, but don’t blame Disney and don’t blame Wal-Mart; blame the vast majority of consumers who will not purchase those products if they were available.

Disney and the retailers are mas-producing merchandise for the 90% of the fans (ie kids) who’s parents actually buy the product. For the vocal minority, there are (limited) options, but you have to go to specialty retailers.

Again, that sucks, but that’s the way the market is telling Disney to act. They are business, after all.

@Dan Seitz, you don’t consider all of the prior merchandising sales records to be valid research? Its not like this is their first attempt at selling this kind of stuff, and honestly, Disney probably has more data about who is consuming their products than any other company out there.

They don’t need to worry about covering all their bases to make sure people don’t get offended. Their goal is to make money, and if people don’t buy Black Widow stuff, then they’re going to make less of it.

Bullshit; that’s why the industries seem so dated. They look at past trends and assume the same is true now.

“Well, I’d love to have some Black Widow t-shirts or have her in the group sets, but as you can see by this data here, boys just aren’t that crazy about Lynda Carter. At least, not Lynda Carter merchandise. Woof.”

@irishda Yes, so dated that in 2014, Disney set a new merchandise record that was almost 50% higher than what they made in 2010.

The model works. As was mentioned above, there is a very successful thing called “Disney Princesses” and Disney is making insane money from Frozen et al and from the Avengers. They don’t see the need to cross the streams, it seems.

Marvel dropped the ball from the start by adding Black Widow to the Avengers. They should have had female heroes with actual powers. Like The Wasp, She-Hulk, or Captain Marvel. A super powered heroine would be impossible to ignore.

I agree 100% that powers may make female characters more desirable for kids. It doesn’t seem like there is much attention being paid to Scarlet Witch either though, so it could just be that boys don’t want to play with girl stuff.

Typically, if a company wants to sell movie merchandise, they promote the merchandise around the time of the movies release. So if they thought Scarlet Witch was going to be a big break out female character with powers that would appeal to boys, they would have been putting her on t-shirts and including her in the toy sets and whatnot. So either they know that kids will see her int he film and not really care about her, or they’re sticking with their guns in that boys will boy boy stuff and girls would rather have a princess doll than an Avenger.

Some dumbass made an unfounded generalization, no one challenged it, they all congratulated each other on a good meeting, and celebrated with a mountain of blow, because, you see, this meeting took place in the 80’s and the decisions made then have never been revisited.

Really? Now that’s some bullshit. There’s a somewhat justifiable reason to leave BW off of team shirts and stuff in that she’s not really part of the core super squad (hence Hawkeye’s similar treatment as noted multiple times above), but Leia is part of the core of Star Wars from the beginning. She should at least get some badass Hoth outfit merch.

My 12 year old daughter wouldn’t wear girl clothes until she was like 10. She wanted super hero clothes 100%. Once she turned 10 and started caring that people thought she looked like a boy, things changed some, but some nice Black Widow merch would have made that transition simpler. /sigh

@Aaron Smarter Rhodey has at least two scenes according to the trailers and TV spots we’ve seen so far. Maybe Sam only has a cameo, since apparently not even Mackie realized he was in the movie, but War Machine definitely has a part to play.

@Dan Seitz I’m /this/ close to going full on Garvey and just saying “fuck it, let’s have our own Avengers” with Luke Cage, Blade, War Machine, and Falcon. Intro Misty Knight halfway in and we got us a (Black Panther) Party!

@Aaron Smarter @Dan Seitz It’s the biggest load of bullshit because they took one of the only two black heroes (and the more interesting one if you ask me), the only female one (sorry Pepper), and stuck them behind the most boring, white bread hero on the whole roster, cursed to play second fiddle to a newspaper editorial comic come to life. And then Marvel has the gall to rip on DC for not “figuring out” Wonder Woman.

As a kid, I loved my superheroes as much as my Barbies. It never occurred to me that one was “meant” for boys and one was “meant” for girls. My parents never made a point to tell me otherwise. Shouldn’t kids be given the option? If I were still a little girl, I would definitely want a black widow tee. She is strong, powerful, and she keeps up with superheroes and gods with her awesome fighting skills. Little girls need to see female heroes like her.

Sure maybe boys would be. I’m a man though and I’d rock a black widow shirt because who would I want to save me? exactly…oh now theres a bomb throw me outta of the way and cover me…with your body…plz.
Why cant guys like girl characters and not be gay and girls like guy characters? Do we live in the 50’s? get over stuff.

This is a very uneducated article that was written without any knowledge of talent or movie clearances. What this doesn’t address is that most female actresses and their agents DO NOT WANT THEIR CLIENTS in ACTION FIGURE or TOY FORM. This has NOTHING to do with Disney or Lucas or anything else. Believe me they want to have someone has hot as Scarlett out there to sell their film as much as possible. It comes from the talent themselves. As an employee of Disney Clearances I deal with this issue on a daily basis. Marketing wants the women in the campaign and the talent or their agents do not want to overexpose their client or themselves so they reject our proposals. Or they have vanity and don’t want to be used as a commodity to sell the film beyond the regular posters and promotion

While I am a Disney employee, the opinion expressed above is my own, and not of Disney or Marvel. It really is the overall dealings I have had with talent by doing clearances over the years. They just don’t want to be overexposed. So they have those clauses written into their contracts. Talent sometimes has the power. Sometimes the studio does. It’s show business.

My 6 year old daughter would kill for Black Widow anything. But I have to search high and low for stuff. What they keep talking about it toys and clothes for boys. If they had a line of pink shirt with Black Widow and Scarlet Witch geared towards girls there would be market for it.

This is a topic that has been going on for years in the Toy/Merchandise/Collecting realm, the reason why the author brings this up is due to lack of content they have to write on, and their quick to blame the ‘Man (Disney)’, instead of the parents.

The reason why there is little of Black Widow (or Hawkeye, Fury, Coulson, and mostly likely Scarlet Witch and Quick Silver) is due to return profit. It’s happened for the past decades when it comes to toys in all series Marvel, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, where there is a lack of female content. Every now and then, they attempt to invest in larger amount of female driven characters, but they sit on the shelves.

Don’t blame the stakeholders, blame the parents. When growing up, I did not care for human characters in the Star Wars universe, all I wanted were the aliens. But my mom forced me to get one Princess Leia (Endor) figure. I got it, played it with like my other figures. Did it change my mind? Sort of – I recognized she was a key character and wanted another figure of hers, but I still didn’t care for Luke or Han. I rather have Bossk, Boba Fett, 4-Lom, IG-88, Zuckass, but no way did I want Dengar. (In the future, I got Zam Wesell and Aurra Sing).

Now a days, if a collector/seller sees a Black Widow, Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers), they are quick to buy. This is due to Hasbro (and others) not wanting to massively produce this product, knowing 90% or more of parents will not purchase a female heroine figure.

That was a weird response from Disney. They came out with her last year with the Winter Soldier movie line and they have a new Maria Hill out with an Avengers exclusive Toys R Us set. They also have released female characters from the comics line that are currently out. The article could’ve mentioned that. There are so many characters that it probably isn’t easy to spread it around evenly which sucks if you want to build the character thing that is usually featured. The hardest character to find from the Guardians line was Rocket Raccoon.

And a-nother thing!! *pulls soapbox over*
Isn’t discluding female heroes- whether Leia, Gamora, or Black Widow just perpetuating this (what seems to be, based on comments above) a universal issue? If the norm were to see these characters always included, then that would be expected by all fans (even the boys fearing cooties), and we could move along to some other topic to get all righteous about.
I humbly suggest that our next topic include something about race since we seem to be solving the gender issue here today.

Black Widow isn’t on most Avengers merchandise for the same reason Marvel refuses to make a movie with their popular female character played by an actress who’s been the lead role in action movies before.

Talking raccoons and walking trees: getting their own superhero movies before black people and women.

1) Black Widow is a secondary character. Sure, she’s part of the Avengers but is not nearly as important as the likes of Cap, Iron Man or Thor. Asking why there’s little merch of Black Widow is like asking where there’s little merch of Molly Weasly. The amount of merchandise is directly related to the importance of the character.

2) On Marvels merchandise website, Black Widow has more merchandise (and larger variety) than Hawkeye who is a character of roughly the same importance. Want Black Widow merch? Here you are: [www.superherostuff.com][shop.marvel.com]

Scarlet Witch, Gamora and especially Black Widow all have one thing in common: they have the darkest pasts out of all the superheros and maybe it was deemed a little too much and are trying to keep them from the limelight? I could come up with theories all day but hey…

I find it difficult to believe they are being excluded on grounds of intimidating boys. My favourite movie happens to be Frozen, I love Elsa (no really I do), I’m a 22 year old male.

Besides all that, I think it would be best to wait on more information as this does not sound right.

It”s cyclical & stupid. Boys will NEVER buy shirts with girls on them if that never becomes a viable option. Believe it or not, things CAN change- a lot of this BS is market driven NOT driven by the public. When marketing makes a certain thing acceptable, it becomes acceptable.

This is NOT new- when “Cars” first came out, my daughter fell in love with the film. She especially loved the character “Tow Mater”. Unfortunately, Disney had decided that only BOYS would be allowed to like “Tow Mater”- GIRLS would be given options of two shirts only- & both had romantic scenes between the girl car & Lightning McQueen- neither of which interested my daughter AT ALL.

How are we encouraging a younger generation of girls to be “kick ass women”- scientists, leaders, surgeons, teachers, researchers, etc. if we aren’t even allowing them minimal options among toys when they are young?

And WHY are we even asking gender based questions about toys AT ALL? Market toys in a less gender based way. Yes, you are going to get more boys buying certain things & more girls buying certain things… BUT stop telling boys what they should & shouldn’t buy, & Girls what they should & shouldn’t buy!

Do you know when you go to McDonald’s to get a Happy Meal they don’t ask you- “We have two toys, which would you like?”
–They ask you, “Do you want a Boy Toy, or a Girl Toy?” What they hell is a Boy toy & what is a girl toy?? (And by the way, usually a girl toy means it’s a crappy doll with yucky hair & the boy toys are usually cool cars or other more interesting toys- just for the record.)

Hawkeye is my favorite Avenger. I care that he doesn’t have any merchandise. Thankfully they, at least I’ve heard, actually give him some shit to do in this movie. Feel bad for Black Widow all you want, she’s had major parts in four movies. Hawkeye got a cameo and was a zombie.